If you or someone you know is in suicidal crisis or emotional distress, please call or email a suicide hotline right away to speak confidentially with a trained professional. Most hotlines are available toll-free, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Canada (Link through for the phone number in your province.)
Ireland: 1850 60 90 90
[email protected]
New Zealand: (09) 5222 999 within Aukland; 0800 543 354 elsewhere
United Kingdom: 08457 90 90 90
[email protected]
LDS Counseling Services
LDS Family Services (International)
Suicide Prevention for LGBT
The Trevor Lifeline (USA): 866 4-U-TREVOR (488-7386)
Readings for Mormons in Distress
Q&A: Sometimes I feel so hopeless I want to end my life. What stops me is the fear of hurting my family and being punished in the next life. Shouldn’t there be a better reason to live?
Healing the Tragic Scars of Abuse
Prayer for a Friend Contemplating Suicide
Important Facts about Suicide
Suicidal thinking is usually associated with problems that can be treated.
Clinical depression, anxiety disorders, chemical dependency, and other disorders produce profound emotional distress. They also interfere with effective problem-solving. But you need to know that studies show that the vast majority of people who receive appropriate treatment improve or recover completely. Even if you have received treatment before, you should know that different treatments work better for different people in different situations. Several tries are sometimes necessary before the right combination is found.
If you are unable to think of solutions other than suicide, it is not that solutions don’t exist, only that you are currently unable to see them.
Therapists and counselors (and sometimes friends) can help you to see solutions that otherwise are not apparent to you.
Suicidal crises are almost always temporary.
Although it might seem as if your unhappiness will never end, it is important to realize that crises are usually time-limited. Solutions are found, feelings change, unexpected positive events occur. Suicide is sometimes referred to as “a permanent solution to a temporary problem.” Don’t let suicide rob you of better times that will come your way when you allow more time to pass.
Problems are seldom as great as they appear at first glance.
Job loss, financial problems, loss of important people in our lives – all such stressful events can seem catastrophic at the time they are happening. Then, month or years later, they usually look smaller and more manageable. Sometimes, imagining ourselves “five years down the road” can help us to see that a problem that currently seems catastrophic will pass and that we will survive.
Reasons for living can help sustain a person in pain.
A famous psychologist once conducted a study of Nazi concentration camp survivors, and found that those who survived almost always reported strong beliefs about what was important in life. You, too, might be able to strengthen your connection with life if you consider what has sustained you through hard times in the past. Family ties, religion, love of art or nature, and dreams for the future are just a few of the many aspects of life that provide meaning and gratification, but which we can lose sight of due to emotional distress.
Do not keep suicidal thoughts to yourself!
Help is available for you, whether through a friend, therapist, or member of the clergy. Find someone you trust and let them know how bad things are. This can be your first step on the road to healing. (Source: https://www.suicidology.org/web/guest/thinking-about-suicide)
Prayer for a Friend Contemplating Suicide
i want to say—do not let your hallowed body leave this imperfect earth
give in to every temptation but the one that robs us of your sacred intensity
your gift of utter selflessness that slips into self-immolation
come back to us
i don’t want your memory—i want your body
that too large heart beating next to mine
we have things to do
let’s begin
over and over
let’s begin
amen.
Sara Burlingame
Cheyenne, Wyoming
Exponent II Vol. 31, No. 2
